Steve,
There's a lot of this sort of stuff about -- the Santa Fe school, chaos
theory and suchlike. Much of it is very dubious. Unlike the two in The
Prisoners' Dilemma the bacteria are in touch with one another -- or at
least with a sufficiently wide swathe around them to produce a chemical
gradient which decides for them.
You're right about the issue of free will lying under the surface. At the
personal level of decision-making there's probably no such thing. Brain
scans show very clearly that decisions (activation potentials) are set up
subconsciously in the pre-motor areas of our frontal lobes and we are only
conscious of them as they actually take place. "Rational" decision-making
(that is, what we think we're doing before or during the actual event) is
really only a rationalization product of a great deal more that's already
been set-up in our heads.
I like to think, however, that there is free will, or at least, free-er
decision-making at a wider and deeper level than the individual. For
example, when a scientific theory is widely believed among fellow
specialists then it's difficult to shift, particularly from within the
community. It takes a younger, incompletely programmed mind, often from
outside the particular special interest group, to point out the anomalies
in existing theory and supply a new paradigm. I'm thinking in particular of
Lynn Margulis's brilliant suggestion that there is DNA in cells that lies
outside the nucleus. Her original paper was rejected by 17 scientific
journals 30 years ago before finding a publisher. It found favour with
enough other younger biologists to be given discussion-room and, today, her
idea is "obvious" to all, and has probably been one of the greatest
biological discoveries of the last century.
Another example that interests me is extreme symbiosis in nature. For
example, one particular orchid has a flower that is almost identical in
colouring and petal shape to a female wasp of one particular species of
which the male pollinates only that particular orchid. This is symbiosis
that's so tight that the existence of either species now depends on the
existence of the other. If one goes extinct, so does the other. "Oh", say
the biologists, "that's an example of co-evolution." As if that explains
it! Yes, one can readily imagine the gene variations of that particular
wasp species gradually being selected to go to one particular flower
perfume. One can imagine gene variations of the orchid gradually being
selected so the flower look like that particular wasp. But were they
individual "decisions" of the two parties? What got the process started in
the first place? Random mutations in the two species? That's possible. But
if you do the maths of these sorts of symbioses each of them would take
billions or trillions of years of random mutations for each pair of them to
begin to click. There are many symbioses in nature and one can, in fact,
regard the whole of life of earth as one big symbiosis of lesser and
greater connections between species. There's some wider and deeper field of
information being involved here, something along the lines of David Bohm's
concept of a quantum field -- but then, that's a theory which is still
largely ignored, as is James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, a partner theory
to Bohm's but in the biological field.
Keith
At 10:15 10/12/2009 -0500, you wrote:
Worth reading the 3 pg piece. Free will issue is in the background in my view.
Steve
======================
The researchers discovered in their study that the bacteriaâs game
theory decision making process is far more advanced than the well-known
game theory problem known as the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Scientists studying how bacteria under stress collectively weigh and
initiate different survival strategies say they have gained new insights
into how humans make strategic decisions that affect their health, wealth
and the fate of others in society.
READ MORE:
<http://www.physorg.com/news179521562.html>http://www.physorg.com/news179521562.html
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
<<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1906557020/>www.amazon.com/dp/1906557020<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1906557020/>/>,
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